Winner of the 2004 Dorset Prize selected by Carl Phillips

A brilliant African-American poet writes of lynching, domestic abuse and love as he examines the race riots that swept the United States in 1919 in haunting, passionate poems, marked by a tender lyrical quality inspired by the blues.

“Equally confident within the lyric and narrative modes, Johnson’s Red Summer startles and impresses with its sheer range of vision, at one moment giving us a hushed, confessional poem, at another a poem of public, political consciousness… Johnson speaks from a space he describes at one point as “between gravity and god”—that is, past the provable, material world, but just shy of any clear confirmation of prayer or faith—and it’s a particular kind of faith that these poems at once enact and point to, what Robert Hayden called “The deep immortal human wish,/the timeless will,” the will to believe. Johnson’s poems remind us that the human record is at last a mixed one: violence, shame, betrayal, and fear, but also joy, courage, love and, yes, hope. Red Summer gives us the stirring debut of a restorative new American voice.”—Carl Phillips

Format: paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-32-3

Born and raised in Compton, California, Amaud Jamaul Johnson was educated at Howard University and Cornell University. His first book, Red Summer (Tupelo, 2006), was winner of the Dorset Prize. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, his honors include fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, and Cave Canem. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.

“The overall feeling of the book is of waiting, of speakers about to act but frozen in the moment before action. And in that moment is beauty, unspoken yet actual, brought to terrible fruition by speaking in/of the poem[.]”— Vince Gotera, North American Review

In the Capital Times of Madison Wisconsin, Heather Lee Schroeder has written a feature article on Red Summer, illuminating Amaud Jamaul Johnson’s writing process, and how he came to write an award-winning volume of gorgeous poems about the lynchings that gave the summer of 1919 the name “Red Summer.” In it she states:

These lyrical poems offer insight into the summer of 1919, when nearly 100 African-Americans were publicly executed (14 of them were soldiers who served in World War I), even as they illuminate the lives of African-American men today.

The Manassa Mauler

(July 4, 1919)

The peach of Willard’s face split wide, ran sweet and sticky on Dempsey’s gloves. Canvas met the lumbering burden of his body seven times. By the end of the first, blood, sweat and saliva pooled at their feet, swirled like dashes of hot sauce in a bucket of egg whites, fell first in drops then by the drum.

Across a field of straw hats and seersucker suits, Toledo’s finest, wet with Willard’s insides. One woman,

genteel in dress, leaned forward with her lace handkerchief and asked the referee for a tooth.

Dempsey’s now freckled face, calm and careful as a butcher’s before the final chop.



Chicago Citizen Testifies in His Defense

July 27th, 1919: Eugene Williams, 17, found dead at the 26th Street Beach, who apparently drowned after being struck on the head by a blunt object.

What might seem like dumb luck isn’t, it’s not happenstance, or being in the wrong place at the right time, it’s about learning to see a certain point in the air, and wanting to touch it with the stone. What I know about religion, I know what the sky calls from your hand, you deliver. I know the angle of ascent, the pitch and point of the line, and I’m not ashamed. The fate of the rock, like that of the boy, falls somewhere between gravity and god.



On Loving Red

After her divorce The first thing my mother Bought was a Firebird; Candy apple with a phoenix

Spread-eagled on the hood, The words “Formula One” In two-tone racing stripes Along the sides.

My stepfather drove an olive Toronado. He had a habit of hitting Stray dogs in our neighborhood; Three by my count, and one

So big it dented the grill And bloodied his windshield. He walked the hallways Of our house that way

Reckless and always ready To run somebody down. Sometimes, I wonder how many Miles we tiptoed in those years.



Big City

He promises a canary dress, white gloves, says they’ll eat chops, thick as her thighs, that they’ll order doubles of the “finest,” see all the Big Names when they arrive. But it’s the thought of them dead: half of what they own draped around them, her head against his chest, his back slack against the headboard, all their letters unopened, bills not paid, long knocks, the notices tacked outside their door. It’s not knowing whether some smell would introduce them to their neighbors or a landlord wheeling them out into the hallway; the highboy he’ll chip on the drive up, the silver she inherited from her mother, her hatboxes, stacked high next to them like a wedding cake waiting to be buried. He heard that “up there” the wind had talons sharp enough to hook a grown man beneath his collarbone and carry him a full city block. He heard that you learned the months by measuring the length of their shadows and even summer was like a quality of night.



Burlesque

Watch the fire undress him, how flame fingers each button, rolls back his collar, unzips him without sweet talk or mystery.

See how the skin begins to gather at his ankles, how it slips into the embers, how it shimmers beneath him, unshapen, iridescent,

as candlelight on a dark negligee. Come, look at him, at all his goods, how his whole body becomes song, an aria of light, a psalm’s kaleidoscope.

Listen as he lets loose an opus, night’s national anthem, the tune you can’t name, but can’t stop humming. There, he burns brilliant as a blue note.

.4 lbs

6 × .5 × 9 in

Winner of the 2004 Dorset Prize selected by Carl Phillips